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Tuesday 31st of January Tessa J. Houghton will give the first talk in the fourth series of Research Seminars at Coventry University on ‘Open Media’. The seminar series is accompanied by a blog that provides more information about the speakers, the theme and the seminars. You can find it here.
Underneath the full program for this term. All be welcome!
- OPEN MEDIA -
A year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness in media in all its forms organized by Coventry University School of Art and Design, Department of Media and Communication. All the seminars are free to attend and open to all.
Programme: January – March 2012
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January 31st:
Tessa J. Houghton (University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus) – ‘#blackout: the viral counterpublicity of online protest’ (Read More)
February 14th:
Paolo Ruffino (Goldsmiths, University of London) – ‘How to open an engine: narratives of production and consumption in video game culture’
March 6th:
Cornelia Sollfrank (postmedia conceptual artist, researcher, and writer) – ‘Performing the Paradoxes of Intellectual Property’ (Read More)
March 20th:
Stefan Herbrechter (Coventry University) – ‘Just Gaming: Digital Games, Remediation, Electracy’
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When: 1:45-2:45 on selected Tuesdays in January, February and March
Where: ICE, The Media and Comm room
Institute for Creative Enterprise (ICE)
Coventry University Enterprises
Parkside, Coventry
CV1 2NE
All seminars are free to attend and open to all
For further details on how to get to Coventry see:
http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/university/maps/Pages/Travelinformation.aspx
How to get to ICE, see:
http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=&daddr=52.403937,-1.505545
All enquiries please contact:
Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk|
www.openreflections.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/Openreflections
Tuesday November 1st media scholar William Merrin will kick off the third series of Research Seminars at Coventry University on ‘Open Media’. The seminar series is accompanied by a blog that provides more information about the speakers, the theme and the seminars. You can find it here.
Underneath the full program for this term. All be welcome!
- OPEN MEDIA -
A year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness in media in all its forms organized by Coventry University School of Art and Design, Department of Media and Communication. All the seminars are free to attend and open to all.
Programme: November-December 2011
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November 1st:
William Merrin (University of Wales, Swansea) – ‘Open Sourcing Knowledge: Towards a University 2.0′ (Read More)
November 15th:
Gabriela Mendez Cota (Goldsmiths, University of London) – ‘Mediating Agriculture in the Age of “Open-Source”: Potential Contributions from Cultural Studies’
November 22th:
Living Books about Life launch (Coventry University, Goldsmiths, the University of Kent, and Open Humanities Press) – Talks by Clare Birchall (University of Kent), Gary Hall (Coventry University), Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London), Peter Woodbridge (Coventry University), and Janneke Adema (Coventry University).
December 6th:
Isis Hjorth (Oxford Internet Institute) – ‘Peer-production of culture: Independent film making in the Wreckamovie community’
December 13th 3:00-5:00 (at Meter Room - 58-64 Corporation Street, Coventry, West Midlands, CV11GF)
Round table on ‘Open Art, or What could Open Art mean?‘
Participants: Elly Clarke (Coventry University), Penny Whitehead and Daniel Simpkins (Independent artists), Ruth Catlow(Furtherfield) and James Wallbank (Access Space Sheffield)
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When: 1:45-2:45 on selected Tuesdays in November and December (except the final round table, which will be held from 3:00-5:00)
Where: ICE, The Screening Room (except the final round table, which will be held at Meter Room)
Institute for Creative Enterprise (ICE)
Coventry University Enterprises
Puma Way, Coventry
CV1 2TT
All seminars are free to attend and open to all
For further details on how to get to Coventry see:
http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/university/maps/Pages/Travelinformation.aspx
How to get to ICE, see:
http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=&daddr=52.403937,-1.505545
All enquiries please contact:
Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk|
www.openreflections.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/Openreflections
Brian Dettmer
As mentioned before, as part of my remix contribution to Mark Amerika‘s project site accompanying his new volume Remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press) I will be blogging and tweeting on remixthebook.com during this week. Underneath the blog entry I submitted.
Scholarly Remix: Academia Reassessed
As part of my research practice I explore the potential of remix theory and remix practices to reexamine the basic notions underlying scholarship and scholarly communication. Many of our preconceptions concerning what merits authorship, authority, originality and so on get constructed within certain dominant discourses on what scholarship is and should be (mostly centered on upkeeping, conserving and repeating print-based notions in the digital realm). Remix practices, I believe, have the power to intervene in these constructions, to disrupt traditional discursive practices, and to both theoretically and performatively create new, experimental practices, based on sharing, openness, process and interaction. However, even in our experimental research practices we often end up repeating the established structures we try to critique, as we as scholars are massively embedded within a knowledge system that demands us to perform in a certain way and to adhere to the scholarly reputation economy. Yet I do believe that even small changes are important, like questioning the system as it is currently set up, and thinking about the values that we deem important in scholarship. A first step is to be aware of the fact that many of our preconceptions towards scholarship are constructions: constructions we can reconsider and change.
My research practice can be seen as my own attempt at reassessing scholarly communication, mostly through examining what the future of the book in scholarly communication can be (or should be) and by exploring what potential role remix practices can play in both scholarship and in the future of the book. The remix I made for remixtebook.com is part of my intervention, as is this blog entry and the tweets I will be sharing with you here. These will be contain some fragments of source material from my remix for remixthebook.com, combined with a selection of links and references I have collected over the years related to remix and scholarship. Finally at the end of the week I hope to be able to live-tweet The culture of Remix, the 2nd International Graduate Conference in Communication and Culture, which takes place in Lisbon on 13-14 October 2011, and promises to showcase some exciting new research on the multiple dimensions of remix.
One of the most interesting sessions on the last day of The Unbound Book conference, was the session on Future Publishing Industries. According to the program the session focused on the affordances and political economies of the publishing industry and libraries. Underneath a small summary of three of the papers presented on the panel and of the discussion afterwards.
James Bridle is a London-based publisher and an all-round creative person, who is involved in all kinds of book-shaped experiments. He finds himself in between and on the border of books, technologies of social reading, and literature. He, amongst others, devised the first book of Twitter, where he printed out his tweets in the form of a book. Bridle begins his talk by stating that there is a certain weight of expectation that people have concerning the physicality of the book. The physicality is what reveals the weight and cultural value given by people to a material object. What is it exactly that is so important about books, Bridle asks. Books exist in time. They exist through time. They are advertisements for themselves; you are immersed within the space of the reading process itself. You spend time with books and go on journeys. In this way books become the souvenir of their own experience. They are both a gift and the locus of more conversations around the book. The problem is, Bridle explains, that we have mistaken the temporality of the book for the physicality of the book. What we really care about is not about how books smell or feel in our hands. Ebooks create a cognitive difference because they don’t give the temporal qualities of the book: they are transient, they go away, and there is no way to enact temporal activities within them. This is starting to change though. Underlining, dog-earring, seeing your process as you go through the book; these instances of knowing where you are and of feeling that you are inside a book, in the space of a book, are being recreated online.
An important aspect of interaction with a book, Bridle states, is through making notes. Through note making we are in many ways doing something far more interesting with books. And we are encouraging people to have these interesting behaviors. However there are also weird behaviors around the book that we don’t talk about. For instance book guilt and the obsession of having to finish a book. Book fear, when you are unable to write in a book or book-ear. This is something that we can change however, Bridle states. We can now encode the totality of the reading experience. We can capture and engage with an archive. This is social reading, Bridle explains, something that provides a lasting and shareable experience. You can either keep them for yourself or share your thoughts. Bridle set up Open Bookmarks, to encourage certain behaviors, and to encourage best practices. Social reading is a great opportunity for publishers, according to Bridle, this is the direction publishing will be going into. Music wants to be recorded and almost all music is recorded. This is starting to happen with books too: books are subliming; they are going up in the air. But we need to keep our experiences intact and this is what publishers need to be involved in. Because this is where literature is going, and this is where the reader’s experience is going.
Nicholas Spice is the publisher of the London Review of Books, a literary magazine, tabloid, with an improved newsprint which appears twice a month. It has about 100.000 readers worldwide. They publish long-form essays on books and what comes out of these books. Spice explains how digital publishing has changed things much for the LRB, it for instance drastically changed the economics of distribution. The traditional distribution chain has been very inefficient, Spice explains. For literary books/magazines it has always been very hard to create readerships, as adverts and reviews are very hard to arrange. Bookselling is a very inefficient way of getting books to the public. High quality literature in the 1980s still had the same reach as it had in the 18th century. The old system was thus immensely inefficient. The change, according to Spice, has to do with the fact that at the LRB they don’t have to print and distribute anymore in order to reach the audience. People come to find them and find them naturally through search engines (instead of they finding them). The content sells itself; it has become an advert for itself. Also the form has hanged. Online the form has disaggregated; people don’t have to read the whole magazine anymore. This has changed the way people engage with the magazine. The output produced by the LRB has become both more and less ephemeral. Everything has now come to the surface; the whole history of the LRB is now online. The average time spend on the website is two minutes and that is quite good. But it is two hours on average with the physical form. The question is, can the LRB survive and flourish in this way? We are attracting very many new readers, Spice states. But the nature of the things and the mode of engagement with the reader have changed. New forms of creativity and literary production are coming up. One of them is the handling of critique and evaluation by the reader, instead of by critics themselves. Will the LRB be welcomed in this world in the long term? The difficulty is that it is an exclusive medium, not an inclusive one. It is the magazine to be in because it knows what to keep out. Editors and staff are sifting out everything. Complexity, difficulty, and things that take time and rarely succeed: that is the LRB. And it takes time: the editing, the writing, and the reading. Even the letters to the editors are heavily edited.
The LRB is very continuous with the main trust of intellectual endeavor since the start of civilization. It has taken years of practice to create objects of intense complexity and interest to the people who want these. Spice does not want to defend this tradition, but this has been what our civilization has been about: the philosophy of the book as being of supreme importance to us. We overestimate, romanticize, and fetishize certain things: the openness of form over completed things, fragmentation over linearity, the draft over what is finished, the spontaneous over what is considered. You can already find these tendencies back in the romantic age: the overvaluation of the social over the solitude. There is a fetishization of real-time over artificial time, Spice states. What happens spontaneously is supposed to be better than long form and contemplation. Is that adding value to the thing itself, Spice asks? Do these things add value to the text, the richness of the text? Is the real conflation to be found between information and the information chain and what we do with that information? What we make out of it to create value is necessarily slow. And the LRB is inherently dedicated to that tradition. Two main questions remain for Spice: can the LRB survive in that world? And, will this new environment be capable of breaking down the tradition of creating works against real-time?
Simon Worthington is one of the founders of Mute, which he started up 17 years ago together with Pauline van Mourik Broekman. Mute is published as a magazine (biannually). As Worthington states, they have always been experimenters in their long history of publishing. Worthington describes the present situation in the publishing world as a slow motion train rack. All these massively disruptive things are going on: the competition market, capitalism, the supposed long-tail and the long-tail of labor… Because of this situation, Mute has always been changing their publishing models. They are both a journal and a critical group in that area, always with a small public and in that sense always in a crisis. Mute started up with the web, in 1994. Their approach has always been free to share; they put all their stuff up online to support interaction with their readers. Their model is based on subscriptions and/or on buying print objects. In 2005 they moved into POD. This was an important change for the value chain and for how things move along, the quality of POD has improved and if needed they print in small runs and they can print internationally, without shipping costs, made possible by companies like Lightning Source.
They also work as a technologist group, making tools. At the moment for instance they are working on a project on e-conversion systems. They have been working in the open source community for a very long time. Their main problem has always been how to sustain a project. They have been trying to find ways to recompense themselves. POD did help a bit with distribution and costs in this respect, Worthington claims. If you have a commitment to free and open, the people at Mute look upon epublishing as the way to go. Looking at the tools that are there however, they decided that they do not all fit to their purposes, so they decided to make their own tools.
Worthington goes on to reflect upon the perceived anxiety about technology and its disruptivity on reading and on the fear of losing the book. He thinks this is a misplaced anxiety. These anxieties are better seen as the effects of global capitalism: that is why bookshops are closing. The return on profit is not high enough within retailing. The larger publishing industry has been a succession of buy-outs towards the creation of a global supply chain. Only the last few years ebooks have become a real thing. What is the trend now? It is a global supply chain. These kinds of pressures have been destroying the small bookshops and independent publishing.
Mute is a small publication, via ebooks and html5 they create things the reader wants to buy. But according to Worthington the future will be controlled by the Apples and Amazons of this world. It will be a vertical model, a capitalist control market. The securing of that market and the holding on to walled gardens is another example of the train-rack. In this situation you don’t know who your customers are anymore and they charge you 30% for controlling the market. These forces are much stronger than the changes in our reading habits etc.
Coming back to smaller publications, Worthington asks how they can be run. They are all nodes in a network of critical and cultural writers. The Eurozine conference reflected on the same issues, how to create a relationship with your audience that isn’t just about reading but about creating something like sustainability. This is very hard to do in a situation where in the UK the top ten publishers control 70% of the market. Donations and things like flat rates wont work they just don’t have the reach. Flat rates and state taxation will never happen and the market does not really welcome smaller publications. It is a hard nut to crack. For Mute, Worthington concludes, at the moment it is the combination of ebooks, html5 presentations and experiments with social reading that do it. But the situation stays precarious.
Questions
How will we be able to sustain the educational and quality aspect of publishing with so much trash and information around?
Simon: The web is dominated by brands. In that way the web mirrors the world we live in very closely. If that is publishing it seems to continue online
Nicholas: Cultural leaders will decide what is quality together. A large circulation of the LRB is always bums on seats and the internet makes that process more intensive.
James: We are going towards an editorship of crowds. Not that we are moving away from experts, but books have always been about recommendations to your friends and now they are just moving to the web. Access and filtering is something publishers have always done and it will increase this role online.
Simon: We need the disruption of the web: why does the meme exist? you need to break these things apart. In the UK the fixed book price disappeared and this has made the book industry and the retail industry collapse with the rise if the amazons etc. Localized variety will be destroyed by global apps and amazons.
How can we promote a culture of solitude? How do you envision that, what could be a next step?
Nicholas: We shouldn’t make the mistake of conflating two sorts of benefit and value. One of the best things of new media is the way it has facilitated contact between people, not only in virtual space but also in physical space, for instance with the LRB bookshop. This was impossible in the old system; you could not reach the people economically. But this is a benefit that has to do with social organization; it has nothing to do with the content and the value of the content and the things that are discussed. I think here solitude is very important. People can write books together but obviously they don’t do it. You cannot produce interesting thoughts quickly; you need to think them out. More than simple blogosphere blatter, we are talking about solitude and time. The evidence is not very strong that the content and value of what is being said is very high.
James: There is a huge conflation here with the social aspect. A blog doesn’t involve comments explicitly. Like everything it can be written solitary too, it is a tool. In the way we build these tools, it is very important to look at the way we use them. Open Bookmarks was also designed to read solitary. I want to see a shift in our emphasis on what these technologies can do to the reader. We can use these tools to create new experiences, almost all on the reader’s side. They can be valuable for them on the solitary side though; we should not force the social in them.
Bob Stein: These are all beautiful statements on all of the best things of print culture (akin to Sven Birkert). I don’t want to fight against that and I don’t design things that force people in a certain direction. It is however another thing altogether to want to figure out what the affordances of these new technologies are all about. For me the age of the individual is coming to an end, the way we are judged etc like this. Will these technologies lead to new societies? I want tot put it in the context of how deep the shift will be from print culture to digital culture
Nicholas: I think it would be wonderful that the individual would be less important, but I am more of a pessimist. I don’t see factual evidence of that changing and of the evidence of technology on changing people that much.
Simon: We need to look at the context of the whole media spectrum: it is about different ideas being in circulation. These experiments need to be run. You want to see what happens when more people write and explore ideas.
The ghost of the author is all around you. Shouldn’t we be cautious of sucking authors into the entertainment industry?
Nicholas: Authors are already part of an entertainment industry. The interesting thing is how the egos of authors will deal with the dispersion of their reputation. As Freud said, we write because of fame, money, and the love of women. The question is, how to get your thrills in the digital age?
James: Authors as performers is something that is not comfortable for me. Yes they have always doing this to some extent. I think we should provide authors with tools that support them. Writing is not such a solitary attitude; authors exist as parts of much larger networks and discussions. The world is what I am writing about so I am in the world when I am writing about it. The writer is also of the network. We are building these huge dichotomies of the web as social and the offline world as non-social and this is not helpful.
We have been discussing the social mob and the solitary individual. But what about the small team or group? If you take out the global industries, what the world looks like is small bands of groups of experts (publishers etc.) and small groups or experts of creators. They are still constrained groups, but not as large as society as large. There are expert bands on the one hand and technology bands on the other. Can we ask ourselves, can there be a way in the future for small expert groups to benefit from small groups of technologists? Blogging experts might also learn something from traditional experts. Can we combine expertise of all sorts on the one hand, and the social networked public knowledge on the other hand?
Simon: Small pockets and groups and the way they connect is very traditional and very physical sometimes. New tools need to be made, and some new kinds of practices need to come in place to let these groups know about each other.
Geert Lovink: We need to disassociate the book from the romanticized solitary author.
After a previous guest post where he developed an interesting forecast related to academic publishing, Ronald Snijder is back with his thoughts on Open Access monographs. You can reach him at r.snijder@aup.nl
Full circle with Open Access Monographs
When I look at publishing academic books in Open Access, the story surrounding it tends to go a full circle, starting and ending with technology.
Technology is disrupting. Publishing in Open Access could only become an option because information technology enabled us to create files in a format – PDF – that could be used for printing and also be widely read on a screen. And the Web made it possible to publish those files without a lot of hassle. It made it possible to think about books that are free as in beer.
Of course, technology did not stop there. Apart from the ‘traditional’ web channel, we can access content from a mobile device. The number of available channels is not just increasing for the readers; those who make OA monographs available can now use several platforms such as repositories, the Google Books or other platforms like OAPEN[1]. Using the right channels also influences the availability: will my precious books be found in all the search engines?
Technology may also be changing our definition of what a monograph actually is. When you add moving pictures, sounds, complete databases, is it still a book? When it is updated regularly, possibly as a result of an online collaboration, can we still speak of a monograph? Some may also question the academic status of a monograph, compared to articles. Books are too long to read, too slow to write. Or maybe not. Personally I do believe that monographs have merit, and that making them freely available is beneficial.
But how beneficial are they, and for who? This is something that I would like to explore a little further in the future. Open Access monographs may have a scientific impact, as barriers are removed. Pricing barriers may be important for scholars in developing countries. Full access may enhance research, by making the contents fully searchable. Making monographs accessible may help to carry their ideas to places beyond the academic circles. All this may happen right now, but on what scale? Open Access should not be just a believe system, it must be backed up with facts.
This leads to another question that is much easier to answer. How can Open Access be sustained? That is simple: through money and power. Funders of research can also fund Open Access publishing of the results. Libraries and publishers could adjust the way they operate; universities could mandate that all research must be made freely available. Sustainability also means that the digital monographs must be preserved, which is a technical issue. So this story ends where it started: technology.
If you like, you can look at a more visual representation underneath or here.
[1] Disclosure: I am employed by Amsterdam University Press, an academic publisher with a large portfolio of books. Furthermore I am deeply involved in OAPEN, aimed at Open Access publishing of monographs.
In two weeks the second series will commence of the Research Seminars I have been organizing at Coventry University in this term and the previous on ‘Open Media’. The seminar series is accompanied by a blog that provides more information about the speakers, the theme and the seminars. You can find it here.
On his Media Gifts website, cultural and media theorist Gary Hall has been (and is) writing a series of writings on ‘the limits of openness’, which, if you are interested in open media, are definitely worth a read and nicely dovetail the theme of the seminar series.
- OPEN MEDIA -
A year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness in media in all its forms organized by Coventry University School of Art and Design, Department of Media and Communication. All the seminars are free to attend and open to all.
http://coventryopenmedia.wordpress.com/
Programme: January-March 2011
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Tuesday 25th January
Jussi Parikka (Anglia Ruskin University) – ‘Zombie Media: Media Archaeology as Circuit Bending’ (read more)
Tuesday 1st February
David Campbell - ‘The new ecology of information: how social media challenges the university’ (read more) Note: in ETG10 (Ellen Terry Building)
Tuesday 8th February
María Mencía (Kingston University) – ‘Open Meaning in Digital Writing’ (read more)
Tuesday 15th February
Daniel Rourke (Goldsmiths, University of London) – ‘Errors in Things and the “Friendly Medium”’ (read more)
Tuesday 1st March
Clare Birchall (University of Kent) – ‘”If a right to the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space”: Why WikiLeaks might not be as radical as it thinks’ (read more)
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All seminars are free to attend and open to all
Time: 4:00-5:30 p.m.
Venue: ET 130 (Ellen Terry Building) Jordan Well, Coventry CV1 5FB (unless otherwise stated)
For further details on how to get to Coventry see:
http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/university/maps/Pages/Travelinformation.aspx
All enquiries please contact:
Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk |
www.openreflections.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/Openreflections
I am running a bit behind on my conference and symposium notes, but here are a few of my observations based on the screening of ‘RIP: A Remix Manifesto’, by Brett Gaylor, at CoDE a few weeks ago. I wrote about RIP before here and here. The screening was followed by an interesting panel discussion between Bill Thompson, Becky Hogge, John Naughton, Jussi Parikka and Geoff Gamlen.
The discussion focused mainly on three themes: remix culture, copyright and business models. Concerning remix culture, the idea was discussed whether culture can be narrowed down to re-mixing or sampling. What about original ideas? As Geoff Gamlen stated, without originality, we will end up in a cultural vacuum. Remix is still quite important, but it focuses more on adding value or re-contextualising things. Remix is an example of collaborative culture more in general and collaboration as a process of culture creation and/or production. These processes are new and at the same time very old, where Henry Jenkins has for instance shown that 19th century folk production was also build on these principles. As Bill Thompson however remarked, it seems that the current media does not want this kind of collaborative production. This has led to, as Jussi Parikka explained, a culture wars. As the documentary showed, you can’t stop copying.
On the issue of how to create revenue from remixes or remixing, Becky Hogge remarked remix is also used as a capitalizing/commodifying idea. However, labor time going into remixes needs to be compensated in some way, and as Jussi explained, we need business models for this. Big corporations are also incorporating open source. Open source has become a business model that can be applied by different people and companies from various backgrounds.
Next John Naughton touched upon the third theme of the larger copyright system. He described how the debate is derailed: file sharing is not automatically theft. There is nothing wrong with copyright but the copyright system in this world is obscene at the moment, John claimed. The current copyright regime is completely unfit for purpose, as the documentary has also shown. Bill argued that this is a deficiency in the democratic process; we thus need to focus on congregational change. The legislation machine is not listening to the requests for reform. Becky recalled her experiences as a legislation lobbyer for the open rights movement and stated how everything revolves around money: copyright is bought by intense lobbying operations which influence legislation.
Going back to the theme of revenue from remixes and remixing, Geoff remarked how the current system is inhibiting, as he would very much like to sell the work that he makes with his collective. He explains how they found other ways to make a living other than releasing remixes. According to Geoff they have never found any opposition from copyright owners.
Returning to the theme of remix culture, John asked whether remix unchecked is the end of originality. This is the rhetoric of people like Jaron Lanier. But as John remarked, there is no way to stop people from being creative. This also poses the question whether creativity is only fuelled by the money that comes from copyright; to what extend are creative people motivated by money?
On the theme of copyright again, the question of moral rights came up. Does a creator have inalienable rights to control the way her or his creative expressions are used? Are moral rights still relevant in the digital age? Jussi explained how this leads back to an ontological point about creativity. We always create from a reservoir of culture, think for instance about language and sound. So even if you have moral rights, this does not mean you control the next step. But what if, as Geoff stated, if it is not possible to control it anymore, your cultural contribution becomes a characteristic part of a remix you don’t agree with?
Returning again to business models, Becky claimed the film did not really tie up the idea of how to pay/reward people for their work. As the great corporations do not let alternative business models come to the rise, they actually make piracy happen, she claimed. John remarked how the film as a political argument reaches a large number of people by focusing on remix culture. But it likewise misses a large group of people: everyone over 40. They don’t see the importance of remix culture, according to John. The film also does not really focus on how remix applies to other or older parts of culture. Every vibrant culture continuously borrows from what comes before.
Going back to the models bit, the discussion returned to the question of who makes money out of remix? As Geoff explained, Girltalk for instance gets paid for being a DJ, not for publishing his work. It is a rare thing to get paid for remixing. As Jussi remarked, this is not something uncommon, there are only very few artists and writers (as well as academics) who actually make money with what they do, most of them can’t live of their work. Geoff commented that there must be a way to think out a digital rights system that works and at the same time provides money for cultural producers. Jussi described how capitalism functions as an absorption machine; it absorbs contradictory mechanisms. Remixing seems to be adverse but corporations are slowly coming up with business models to incorporate remixing. Remix is thus not anti-capitalist, and as Geoff added as a final remark, it is not against corporate interests at all.
I have been organizing a Research Seminar Series, taking place at Coventry University in this term and the next, on ‘Open Media’. Last Tuesday the first lecture was given by Federica Frabetti from Oxford Brooks University entitled ‘DIGITAL AGAIN? The Humanities Between the Computational Turn and Originary Technicity’. You can find more information about the lectures in the first term at the end of this post.
The series will be podcasted and will be made available via iTunesU and this blog.
Related to the series, let me draw your attention to some other recent material that challenges the concept of openness in a more fundamental way. HASTAC, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, has for instance been drawing attention to the concept of openness via a few blog posts, including this one, (do also check out the extensive forum comments underneath) and it has been hosting the Storming the Academy event at the Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona a few weeks ago. There is also a wiki related to this event where you can find more information.
Furthermore, I came across this fascinating presentation today by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, in which she, amongst others, critiques the notion of content as being object-based.
Coventry School of Art and Design and the Department of Media and
Communication invite you to
- OPEN MEDIA -
A year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness in media in all its forms. All the seminars are free to attend and open to all.
OPEN MEDIA
Digital Media have today become ubiquitous and all pervasive. Our lives and experiences are being mediated non-stop by a host of mobile and web-based devices which offer the possibility of merging, mixing, and mashing-up texts, images, sound and other data formats. In the digital age we are no longer confined by the boundaries that once governed traditional media. Notions of authorship, expertise, authority, stability, ownership and control from above are all being challenged by the prosuming multi-user and crowd-sourced use of borderless multimedia applications. People can produce and publish their own books via Lulu.com, promote their art on online gallery sites, and advertise their music via Myspace and Youtube. They can educate themselves via iTunesU, call friends abroad for free via Skype, connect and update the world via Facebook and Twitter, and fund projects via Kickstarter.
These developments have led many to claim that the web and digital media offer unprecedented democratizing possibilities for media producers, consumers and critics. However, reality is of course more complicated than that. A lot of (public and tax-funded) media are still behind pay-walls. Our private data are hosted and distributed by commercial social media platforms. Blogs are still not taken seriously in the academic world. Google is digitizing our books. Many makers of music mash-ups are being sued for copyright infringement and fears regarding ebook piracy continue to rule the literary world.
The concept of openness is often employed as part of a radical critique of the closed-off worlds of what might be called ‘traditional media’. It is variously used to urge for the right to transparency, the ethics of sharing, the value of re-use and the benefits of connecting. But openness also has its drawbacks. If cultural products are freely available, who then pays the producers of those products? Does open data pose security risks? And who gets to control the data? Who governs our creative outputs? In what way can we control and keep a check on the media we use? Is there still a place for authority and expertise in open media, or are these notions being explicitly challenged? In what ways can media be open, and can they ever really be truly open? What are the limits of openness? Where does openness end? Or should we perhaps just focus on degrees and aspects of openness? How can we compose a media critique when media – including our critique itself – are constantly in the process of being upgraded, updated, merged, mixed and changed?
This series of research seminars will explore various aspects of openness. Special attention will be given to the benefits and drawbacks of openness, and to the many possibilities openness offers for the future of media production, use and critique.
Programme: November-December 2010
Tuesday 9th November
Federica Frabetti (Westminster Institute of Education) – ‘Digital again? The Humanities Between the Computational Turn and Originary Technicity’
Mafalda Stasi (Coventry University) – ‘Transmedia and fan cultures’
Shaun Hides and Peter Woodbridge (Coventry University) – ‘Open Source Education: A radical case for the Arts and Humanities’
Daniel Rourke (Goldsmiths, University of London) – ‘Errors in Things and the ”Friendly Medium’
Note: in ET 130 (Ellen Terry Building) Jordan Well, Coventry CV1 5FB
All seminars are free to attend and open to all
Time: 4:00-5:30 p.m.
Venue: RCG25 (Richard Crossman Building) 44 Jordan Well Coventry CV1 2,
UK (unless otherwise stated)
For further details on how to get to Coventry see:
http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/university/maps/Pages/Travelinformation.aspx
All enquiries please contact:
Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk |
www.openreflections.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/Openreflections
Part 3: Remix re-examined
See here for part 1 and here for part 2
Navas’s and Manovich’s thinking on remix seem to complement each other nicely. Where Navas analyses remix as discourse from a historical context, taking into account power-relations and the wider societal context shaping and triggering the rise of remix, Manovich takes a deep leap into the future, trying to think a world in which remix and the free flow of information through meta-media have become ubiquitous. He explores what this will mean for the way we produce, consume and analyse culture. Navas shows how remix has been an active force for change in the past, Manovich wants to explore how remix can still be an active stance to shape culture in the future. Both of them introduce the problem of fluidity and time and what this means for our (print-based) object-oriented society based on repetition of well-defined objects created by specific authors. Navas looks at the archive as a means to capture and stabilize cultural fluidity whilst at the same time creating reliability. Manovich looks at the way we can work with modularized recombinable data-sets to structure and control information flows. Both of them struggle with the dilemma of object-like thinking within a fluid environment. For both of them remix is or has become the defining characteristic of our digital culture.
Open Books
The dilemma’s Navas and Manovich touch-upon in their writing on culture at large can be directly related to our thinking surrounding the book and/or the future of our knowledge and communication system within academia. As Deleuze and Guattari argue in A Thousand Plateaus, a book is an assemblage, a multiplicity, it only exists in its connections. The paradox lies in the fact that a book can at the same time be seen as an organism as well as a body without organs, with neither a subject nor an object, as pure becoming:
“A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity—but we don’t know yet what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has been elevated to the status of a substantive.”1
This very well captures the dilemma between a more closed off and object-oriented thinking of the book and a more fluid, open thinking of the book as a network of relations, making contact on and through the outside. The metaphor of remix and the influence of remix culture and theory on the way we look at the book is thus an interesting one. What happens with the order of the book as we embrace this more open thinking of the book as becoming, without a stable core, no fixed author and a yet unknown system of authority? The question is whether it is still useful in the digital age to think of the book—and our knowledge system based upon it—as a stable object and whether it is possible (and necessary!) to look at the book more as an object of possibilities, a fluid moment of potentiality and becoming. And this is where remix theory comes in handy, trying to think exactly what it means when objects increasingly become bodies without organs and only exist in their connections to each other.
The importance of Navas analysis of remix for the book and the knowledge system we have created around it, lies in the way he tries to cope with the problems of stability and authorship. Navas discusses three partway solutions that are, as I feel, of direct interest for scholarly communication and its battle with these notions in the digital age. First of all he explores the archive as a way of both stabilizing flow and creating a form of authority out of flux and continual updating. Next to that he proposes the role of s/he who selects (or curates or moderates) as an alternative for the author. In a way one can argue that this model of agency is already quite akin to scholarly communication, where selection of resources and referring to other sources, next to collection building, is part of the research and writing process of most scholars. Finally Navas tries to explore an alternative means of critique based on a fluctuating identity and culture that tries to resist commercialization by staying on the liminal threshold; one based on seizing the production tools, and on seizing control over repetition by means of representation. And Manovich argues for a similar potential, the potential of culture (and in this respect knowledge) creators to modularise data and make it adaptable within multiple media and various platforms, mirroring scientific developments with standardized meta-data and the semantic web. These are all interesting steps beyond thinking ‘the book’ status-quo, challenging scientific thinking to embrace process, sharing, and letting go of idealized ideas of authorship that can stand in the way of true creativity. Navas does an interesting job in starting to deconstruct them, to show how they increasingly become problematic in todays remix culture brought about by the possibilities of digital media.
But in many ways Navas (as well as Manovich) runs up against what seem to be the borders of this more process-oriented thinking. His alternative options are equally still very much connected to stability: the archive is needed to objectify culture; selection is another form of agency and does not (fundamentally) do away with authorship; and an alternative form of critique is still a critique focused on agency and on a (stabilized) object, on a structure of control. The question of keeping an archive also becomes increasingly problematic when objects become dispersed amongst various platforms. How do we keep track of an object or of data once it goes viral? And what about the role of the selector when selections can be made redundant, choices can be altered and undone by mass-collaborative, multi-user remixes and mash-ups? In what way are the solutions Navas and Manovich offer only temporary solutions to cope with a world that is and always has been in flux and is now increasingly unstoppable in all its fluid manifestations? In what way might it be necessary to let go of this object-like thinking and to start theorizing a perception of culture, science and critique that lets go of these fixed frames of thought and immerses the real of eternal becoming? Wouldn’t it be more interesting to perceive culture as a fluidity from which we abstract objects for the sake of analysis and clarity, instead of seeing culture as being build up out of separate building blocks and recombinable data-modules? Isn’t it time to start thinking a knowledge and communication system based on continual updates and change, without a stable core, both as its object and subject? And is this even possible? In what way does the concept of the open book present us with a paradox in this respect?
Performative inflections
Remix Theory and many remix theorists (like for example Navas, Manovich, Lawrence Lessig, Paul Miller a.k.a DJ Spooky, Mark Amerika) have one more important aspect in common. Many of them experiment with different kinds of remix-practices themselves. In many ways their work poses a challenge to the often perceived dichotomy between theory and practice. Navas remixes his older writings, updates them and uses various media (amongst others film) to bring his message across. By using a blog as his main outlet he connects to other thinkers and consumers. On his blog he also acts as a curator or selector, bringing together other texts on remix. Furthermore he practices an interdisciplinary practice mixing his theoretical writing with his curatorial and art practices concerning remix. In Navas words:
“Remix Theory is designed to move towards a remix of itself, by recombining much of the material that is archived to put to test the possibilities of Remix. This will become transparent as the database grows, and specific projects are developed. The site is designed to host, archive and promote projects which explore the current possibilities of Remix online and offline; it is prepared to become a repository of collaborations with different people and institutions.”2
Manovich approach to his work in many ways mirrors software production. He brings out various versions of his work, unedited, and in many ways “unfinished”, waiting for feedback from the community after/from which they can subsequently be updated. His books can also clearly be seen as a remix of his various articles. Furthermore his scientific method can be seen as one in which media and methods from the hard sciences get mixed up and applied to ‘traditional’ humanities subjects within his cultural analytics framework.
Remixing knowledge
What is so interesting about remix for academic knowledge production, consumption and dissemination? I see remix as an exciting way to initiate a ‘thinking beyond the book’. Digital texts and books contain the potential to transform our knowledge system or the way we think and relate to knowledge. This ‘thinking beyond the book’ is not something that only became possible with the rise of the digital. It has always been part of the way we have envisaged and constructed our knowledge system. There are however some ‘knowledge practices’ we have adopted and grown accustomed to, such as authorship, stability and authority. Digital and online media offer the potential to increasingly critique these notions where thinking a knowledge system beyond these notions increasingly seems to become a practical reality. Remix is a liminal concept in this way; it stands on the border of these customary ways of thinking. It shakes them up. It poses a potential crisis.
Remix Theory can be seen as a new way to critically think the potentiality of the book, as a way to think beyond the book, as a strategy to explore its multiple potentialities, to challenge established notions like stability, identity and materiality that are all bound up with (printed) books and at the same time with our current conception and practice of knowledge.
Remix is a cultural and a political phenomenon, it can be seen as a resistance against essentialisms. It can be used as means to critique the essentialist doctrines at work within the Humanities. Remix Theory can be a framework to question issues of authorship, stability, authority and originality within these disciplines and within science at large, just as much as it has been a framework to question these in for example music, art and poetry. Finally, the way it mixes theory and practical methodology, and the way it mixes media can be seen as both a commentary on and an inspiration for the (digital) humanities. And although, as I have argued before, it does not fundamentally challenge or alter these concepts, it is a (necessary) step in the right direction, towards a more fluid conception of the humanities.
1 See: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Notes on Unbound Books – A Conference Report (Part I)
June 30, 2011 in Art, Copyright, Ebooks, Information and knowledge, Lectures and Conferences, Reading | Tags: AAAARG.ORG, Adrian Johns, Agrippa book of the dead, Alan Liu, attention, Authority, Avaxsearch.com, binding, Bob Stein, Books, broadsides, CD-ROM, Commentpress, David Stairs, DRM, Ebooks, Elisabeth Eisenstein, expanded books, fixity, Florian Cramer, future of the book, Geert Lovink, Henry Warwick, HyperCards, hyperlinks, Hypertext, Institute for the Future of the Book, iTunes, Johanna Drucker, John Cayley, McKenzie Wark, Networked Books, New Media, p2p networks, Peter Stallybrash, Piracy, place, Publishing, Raymond Queneau, Reading, shared attention, social reading, Textz.com, The Voyager Company, unbinding, Unbound Book Conference, Unbound books, William Gibson | 1 comment
Last month I attended The Unbound Book conference, a three day gathering of experts on books, publishing and reading, to collaboratively explore the future of the book and the transformation of reading, publishing and learning. Belated I wrote out my notes on some of the most striking lectures, a mere add-on to the amazing documentation that already accompanies the conference, which can all be found on the conference website. Video recordings of all the sessions were made, and all the talks were also live-blogged by students of the MA in New Media at the University of Amsterdam. Their reports of the talks can be found here.
“A long form of attention intended for the permanent, standard and authoritative i.e. socially repeatable and valued communication of human thought and experience (usually through narrative, argumentative or other programmatic organizations of bound-together yet discrete textual, graphic, and haptic elements”
What has changed now are the cultural significances of the book in this time. Features that are emphasized now are long form of attention, permanent, standard, authoritative. Book historian Elisabeth Eisenstein wrote about the standardization and fixity of the book. Even people who are skeptical of these attributes still see them as attributes of the book.
Liu draws our attention to the focus on materiality within new book historical studies. Materiality is seen as historically situated and highly irregular. He paraphrases Peter Stallybrash on the navigation of the bible, a non-linear, hyper-referenced book. The codex and printed books were books of discontinuity. This is also the basis of Adrian Johns’ critique of Elisabeth Eisenstein: the printed book was very irregular. The physical book is thus no more long, standard or authorative as any other online form. The rhetoric focuses on the end of the book: the book is dying, it is heading towards a postmodern heath death into entropy: atomic bites. Reading is at risk, fewer and fewer people are reading books. The death of the bookstore is near. Books are becoming shorter; Liu calls this the phenomenon of the incredible shrinking book, mirroring a recent trend in online publishing. In a way we are going back to broadsides. On a microscale this is visible in for instance the WordPress plugin Commentpress, where books have become paragraph-sized, with their own crowd-sourced comments.
Liu discusses several online book projects related to this idea, including William Gibson’s Agrippa book project. This is not a book, Liu states, as a material longue durée; it is a reality that the long-lasting representation of the book revolves around the book as a long swirl of public discourse, without the actual book actually existing. The book is a long-form of attention that we as a culture crave and which we need to find in the future. The book is a discourse; it is the whole discussion that evolves around it in a culture. The book is thus not a thing (physical book/ebook) but a long form of shared attention.
A video made for the Unbound Book conference by the Rietveld students Adrian Camenzind, Louisa Gagliardi and Lydia Sachse.
The session entitled The unbound book was introduced by Geert Lovink. He stated that this session would not look into the question of morals or into what we have lost or gained—the question of ethics—but that it will look beyond good and evil at the process of the unbinding of the book itself. The unbinding of the book as we witness it right now is very much part of the explosion of the amount of information and the related need to search and visualize this enormous amount of information.
It has come abound in the iTunes model (Amazon’s Kindle ebook store) vs. p2p network sharing (aaaaarg). Cramer compares it with the development of music. Music files haven’t become interactive, what has changed is that they are now being massively shared, what is shared however are simple audio files. What is being swapped on aaaarg are plain vanilla PDF and text files. Electronic books have moved from the codex to the computer file, which can be seen as a hybrid of the codex and the scroll. Developing a book as a software exploitation of it self is very expensive and it needs to be updated. It just does not scale. Epub and PDF works because it is not multimedia and linear.
These developments led to Stein seeing a book as a place. A place where readers (and sometimes authors) congregate. According to Stein reading will increasingly take place in the browser, not in mobile apps or in proprietary non-browser based readers, which would be way too complicated. HTML5 offers many possibilities to create beautiful interactive books. That is why Stein devised the online platform for social reading called Social Book. With a group of colleagues he build an eco-system for publishing that sees books as places were people gather. Stein explains how Social Book distinguishes 4 flavors of social reading. Firstly having a conversation with people in the margin of a book. Secondly it means having access to all the comments other people made. Social also means extracting an experts comments, it is a guide through a book. Fourthly it offers interaction with the author(s). Social thus means being able to engage with authors asynchronously or in real time inside the book.